AI everything! For a month! That’s one way to describe the talk I gave for Brown’s AI and Humanities Research group, part of the Center for Digital Scholarship. Less clickbaity: How might historians use AI in their research? I tried a variety of AIs—ChatGPT, CoPilot, JSTOR AI, among other—on projects I’m working on now. I also went back to some earlier projects to see what AI might have done for me. (My work is in nineteenth and twentieth-century American history.)…
Two more short videos prepared for my “Methods in Public Humanities” course. These address museum collections, one on registration and one on online access to collections. They’re designed as background for my students, but might be more generally useful. They join a larger group of short videos on exhibitions, here. More to come!
How best to make journal articles accessible? Over the years, I’ve published a few dozen essays, in a range of journals, books, encyclopedias, newsletters, and blogs. A recent discussion with folks from the Brown University Library about the Brown Digital Repository got me thinking about how accessible they were, and how to make them more accessible. And so I spent some time trying to figure out what was on the web, what was open to the public, and what to…
I’m pleased to announce a new timeline of museum history. The timeline starts in the 17th century, with the 1628 Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest and Ole Worm’s 1655 Museum Wormianum, and comes up to the present day (Decolonize this Museum! and the Museums Change Lives campaign). It includes 175 entries about exhibits, collections, museum philosophy, and more. The timeline is a complement to my new book, Inside the Lost Museum: Curating, Past and Present, and is organized in…
A four part series on Medium, “Cataloging History,” on the history and practice of museum catalogs, focusing on the publications of the 1853 New York Crystal Palace fair: Part 1: A brief history of American museum catalogs to 1860 Part 2: The New York Crystal Palace Catalogs Part 3: Catalog as Book, File, and Database And coming soon! Part 4, on what we can learn from analyzing the catalog as database. Why Medium for these? I’m experimenting with heavily illustrated essays, and…
As I research my book on museums I tweet some of my sources. Gathering them here for your museum-history pleasure.
For a search engine to work well, it needs to know where to look. The streetlight effect offers a common metaphor. The drunk man searches under the streetlight because that’s where it’s easiest to find things. In a search of a museum collection database, we can search most easily, or only, in the categories that are well described, that we have good vocabulary for, that curators care about. I’d like to suggest another metaphor: the amusement park dark ride….
When I taught a course on the history of museums, I found it useful to have a ready source of historical images of exhibitions from the past 500 years of so. As an experiment, I added Pinterest to my workflow. It’s extremely easy to add an image to a Pinterest board; click a button, correct the caption, and you’re set. And Pinterest makes suggestions, too: other boards with similar images, which makes it easy to explore and find images others…
I enjoyed speaking with Melissa Rayner as part of Gale/Cengage’s GaleGeeks webcasts. You can enjoy a recording here. (For those of you who listened closely and noted that I couldn’t remember the name of my favorite tool for visualizing collections: it’s viewshare, at http://viewshare.org/.)
Meet the museumbot. Museumbots tweet random objects from museum collections, four or five objects a day. I know of three museumbots, and I’m sure there are more. @museumbot tweets Metropolitan Museum of Art collections, @cooperhewittbot, and @bklynmuseumbot their eponymous museums’ collections. Here’s the last few objects from @museumbot, as good a sample as any: It’s their randomness that makes museumbots so interesting. The two objects to the left are unlikely representatives of the Metropolitan Museum. A belt fragment? A dessert dish?…
